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The Morning Roundup: North Korea Says It Can Nuke the U.S. Mainland

Yesterday was Mother's Day. We hope all you moms out there had a good one. It was also graduation weekend at several Triangle universities, including UNC and Duke. Bravo, guys and gals. Welcome to the real world. Good luck out there.

The grassroots organization wants to put government back in the hands of the people. And there are several important elections coming up in Durham—including for mayor. From the INDY's Sarah Willets:

In November 2015, a group of activists helped Jillian Johnson win 12,497 votes and a seat on the Durham City Council. Since then, members of that group have gone on to form Durham for All, which on Saturday launched a campaign to unite ten thousand Durham residents in a “cross-class, multiracial movement” to put government back in the hands of the people.

Ten thousand is how many people the group says it takes to elect (or defeat) someone to municipal government in Durham. By this year’s city council election, the group hopes to have five thousand Durham residents engaged in its mission. But the city council election is just the first step in a larger movement to give Durham residents a voice, harness the collective power of that voice, and invert a political system it believes is rigged in favor of corporations and right-wing politicians.

2) North Korea launched a missile and boasted that it has "nuclear capability."

North Korea said Sunday's test-fire of a ground-to-ground ballistic missile proved the missile is capable of carrying a large nuclear warhead, state news agency KCNA said in a report Monday.

The country's leader, Kim Jong Un, supervised the launch of the Hwasong-12 missile that reached an altitude of 2,111.5 kilometers (1,312 miles) and flew 787 kilometers (489 miles), KCNA said. That's higher and closer to Russia than other North Korean tests, according to US officials.

Naturally, Kim Jong Un followed up the launch by threatening the U.S.

North Korea warned the United States not to provoke it, saying the "US mainland and Pacific operations" are within range of North Korean missiles, KCNA said.

Good thing we have a stable leader who is perfectly capable of handling a nuclear crisis in the White House.

Against the regal backdrop of a grand reception room in France’s presidential palace, Emmanuel Macron, 39, was officially installed on Sunday as the youngest president in modern French history.

In his short speech to mark the occasion, he encouraged the French to embrace the future, to hold him to a high standard and to join him in the hard work ahead.

“I reassure you that not for a single second did I think that everything changed as if by magic on May 7,” Mr. Macron said of the day he was elected. “This will be slow work, demanding, but indispensable. It will be up to me to convince the French that our country, which seems threatened by the sometimes contrary winds of the world, carries in its heart all the resources to be a nation of the first rank.”

4) Carl Bernstein calls James Comey’s firing a "dangerous" moment.

Few print journalists are as historically significant as Carl Bernstein, whose work four decades ago helped topple a president. So, what did he have to say about the nation's current president firing the FBI director who was investigating his administration's potential ties to Russia? From CNN:

Carl Bernstein says the Trump administration could put the United States in a "more dangerous" situation than the Watergate scandal did during President Richard Nixon's tenure.

Bernstein, a CNN contributor whose reporting for the Washington Post helped topple Nixon in the 1970s, said Sunday on CNN's "Reliable Sources" that he is concerned Republicans in Congress haven't voiced more skepticism of President Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey last week.

But why, Carl, should we expect Republicans to go after their own guy?

"The Republicans during Watergate were heroic. They are the ones who said, 'What did the president know, and when did he know it?'" Bernstein said.

He added that those Republicans investigated and supported the impeachment of Nixon "because they were willing to see the truth served." Nixon resigned before a trial in the U.S. Senate could happen.

Bernstein said there has not been "something similar" yet from Republicans today.